My most memorable online learning experience is the online course: EDCI 337 I took last year as one of my electives at Uvic. It was my first time taking an online course at Uvic, and the topic is interactive and multimedia learning. It focuses mainly on introducing the theory and application of multimedia learning in an interactive learning environment (EDCI 337, 2019). The course is aimed to help educators to create the educational material by using different kinds of social media platforms and tools. In this online course, there were four main challenging projects: comics, screen-casting, whiteboard animation, and interactive multimedia elements. For each project, we could decide to either work individually or work in a group of 2-3 people corporately. Also, each project should be uploaded and shared in a specified forum before the deadline so that all the classmates can engage in a semi-synchronous discussion and provide feedback to the projects that they feel most interested in individually. Here is an animation project that my team made to teach other people about “Color theory“.
This course contains rich media, including animation, video, audio, reading materials, and images. Detailed instructions and a helping tool have been provided to benefits on learner’s learning experiences. There are many theories in last week’s reading: “Effective Practices in Distributed and Open Learning” can be connected to the design of EDCI 337. First of all, the entire course design and assignments are clearly stated in Course Syllabus in the first class. This action provides a lot of flexibility to students to arrange their time and work on their own speed and space. Furthermore, in Crosslin’s theory, ‘humanizing’ as an important element in an online class, the process to eliminate the distance between instructor and student should be provided to engage the connection (Crosslin, M., 2018). Online discussion forums in this online course as an example of communicative media or technology have significance engage in building strong communication and interaction between learners and teachers (Bates, T., 2019). In my EDCI 337 experience, instructor has provided a few useful forums, such as “introduction and final reflection forum”, “sharing cool finds forum”, “help forum”, and “respond to requests forum”, to help students to communicate with each other, learn from each other, and interact with each other. Students are also encouraged to ask questions via email.
By my observation, this online course also has designed to reflect on two main communication types in Crosslin’s theory: student-content and student-student. For each project, students should read class materials and watch the relevant videos by themselves beforehand to understand how to complete the course successfully, which is student-content interaction. On the other hand, after upload and share our own project on the designed forum for each project, students need to interact with other students by commenting on their posts and reply to their comments. Last but not least, as a semi-synchronous online course, the instructor did not provide any synchronous interactive sessions, such as live sessions, but he encouraged students to work in a group and use online synchronous tools to communicate with each other.
References
Bates, T. (2019). Understanding technology in education. https://via.hypothes.is/https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadi gitalagev2/part/chapter-8-understanding-technology/
Crosslin, M. (2018). Effective Practices in Distributed and Open Learning. https://via.hypothes.is/https://uta.pressbooks.pub/onlinelearning/cha pter/chapter-5-effective-practices/
EDCI 337:Interactive & Multimedia Learning. (2019, May 14). Web.Uvic.Ca. https://web.uvic.ca/calendar2019-09/CDs/EDCI/337.html
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